Neil Simon, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 16-22, 34-42, 43-51. In the following excerpts, Johnson argues that the third act of The Odd Couple, is flawed because Simon has created such fully realized characters that he is unable to manipulate them convincingly for the happy ending he has contrived. Johnson also states that in Plaza Suite Simon is showing that outward success may not be enough, and that Last of the Red Hot Lovers does not meet the challenge it sets for itself to mediate the conflict between se...

“A Rhetoric of American Popular Drama: The Comedies of Neil Simon,” in Players Magazine, Vol. 51, No. 1, October, 1975, pp. 11-15. In the following essay, McMahon argues that Simon introduces serious themes in his plays, which challenge accepted attitudes and practices, only to later trivialize them and reinforce a conservative status quo.

Neil Simon is a critical embarrassment. It is bad enough that he is commercially the most successful dramatic writer of the past decade, but to make matters worse no one is quite sure why his comedies are such triumphs. It is very easy to point out the qualities that Simon's writing lacks; indeed, when placed up against any conventional checklist of "characteristics of great comedy," his plays are likely to fail on every count. Every count but one, that is; the fact is indisputable that...

Simon's mature theater work combines comedy with moments of poignance and insight. Examples abound. In The Odd Couple, Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar, although hilarious to see and listen to, demonstrate how destructive a selfish person can be. Promises, Promises dramatizes how Chuck Baxter and Fran Kubelik, who think they can manipulate people at no cost to themselves, learn that others, more shrewd and calculating, manipulate them and make them pay heavily for their proud schemes. The exchanges betw...

“Neil Simon, Boffmeister,” in The National Observer, Vol. 10, No. 46, November 20, 1971, p. 24. In the following essay, Ridley observes that in The Prisoner of Second Avenue Simon has moved from the cheerful innocence of his early comedies to a comedy painfully aware of distress and hopelessness.

Is Neil Simon going soft? Or is the prodigiously industrious playwright tapped out? One hopes not, but his latest effort, "I Ought to Be in Pictures," an oddly muted comedy …, is, when all is said and done by its three characters, an empty and labored evening. "Shaky confidence" is ascribed to the middle-aged hero by his middle-aged mistress, and it also seems to be Simon's problem here. Teetering on the edge of sentimentality, this play about a father and daughter ...

I begin to perceive that I may have been unfair to Neil Simon in pursuing over the years a theory about him which has been, after all, entirely inside my head and not his, and which I have therefore had no reason to grow impatient with him for failing to live up to. The awkward fact of the matter is that I have thought I could detect a certain figure in the brightly colored wall-to-wall carpet of his work, but Mr. Simon has now made it plain that the figure isn't there and never was there; moreover, ...

Everybody has to make a separate peace with Neil Simon. Mine came when I decided he was really an abstract artist who used gags the way Mondrian used little cells of color—a good Simon play was a formal construct in which the gags were in pleasing tension with one another. The subjects—odd couples, red-hot lovers, sunshine boys—were really only different ways of arranging the Mondrian gag-colors into different patterns. Since having this momentous insight into the Simon gestalt, I can e...

When will playwrights learn that it takes more than a string of funny lines to make a comedy? Actually, Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady purports to be more than a comedy, and the lines, for the most part, are less than funny. Less than funny for several reasons. 1) They traipse over the same old terrain, from sex-starvation to unquenched-thirst jokes, from kinky-sex to show-biz in-jokes, from Mafia to Polish jokes. (There are no elephant jokes.) You may not have heard precisely these jokes before, ...

To say that I am at a loss for words is merely to put a cliche where my heart should be. But I truly am at a loss for words. I probably admire Neil Simon more than most of my colleagues. He is a major playwright, a comedian who survives fashion through the honesty of his comic agony.

In many ways Neil Simon's "I Ought to Be in Pictures" … is a fantasy play. It presumes that a daughter who was abandoned by her father at the age of 3 can establish a close relationship with him, speak more candidly, manage to convey all the inner warmth daughters who have lived with their fathers all their lives cannot. But the theater, after all, is a place where wishes are fulfilled, and the play is set in Los Angeles, which everyone knows is not a real place—so it is n...

[Simon delightedly immerses] himself in the minutiae of modern American upper-middle-class existence, which no one conveys with more authority—or, anyhow, more assiduity—than he…. Simon can see the eternal, if at all, only as an aspect of the temporal; for him, "the troubles of our proud and angry dust" means that the cleaning lady didn't come in this morning. The problem with Simon for serious critics is that he is good enough to make them angry that he isn'...

"Fools" is Neil Simon's nineteenth play in twenty years—and his weakest. It's a fable about a Ukrainian village whose inhabitants are under a curse of stupidity. Apparently Simon is trying to say something about how society can wrongly label some of its groups; maybe this is his allegory on race and IQ. If so, he's wrecked an important subject by trying to be a folk artist, forgetting that he is a folk artist in his real plays like "The Odd Couple" and...